Passed OCMJEA/SCEA

phew, today I got the mail, that I passed the JEE5 architect certification - I got the result 6 days after the essay exam.
Thank you, for all the threads in the OCMJEA forum.

My experience:
1. Exam - 78% The exam was tricky, the questions where long, but there was nothing unexpected or weird stuff. I took the whole time. (120min I think)
I've done the whizlabs mocks a lot of times, which where very helpful and realistic.
For me, this was the hard part - but the interesting one, as I'm using mainly tomcat, spring, hibernate, it was very impressive to see Oracle's default architectures and solutions.

2. Assignment - scored 138 Choose your favourite UML tool!
I used UMLet, which was quite cool - as you can edit the diagram as text, but not comparable to Enterprise Architect from Sparx, especially with sequence diagrams and comfort, over all I found UMLet very nice, so clean, so fine, so focused.
I needed and wanted a free UML tool, as I'm using GNU/Linux at home - Unfortunately I didn't try ArgoUML, but it looks quite good, in terms of comfort and ease of use.
The assignment was alright, of course, I thought there is everything missing in the specs - but this is quite realistic So I made proper assumptions and didn't make it complicated.

I hope my examiner used a widescreen, the sequence diagrams where quite wide, I wouldn't suggest this.

3. Essay exam - took 4 days after submitting the assignment
The questions where variations of the ones, posted in this blog.
I prepared answers for each question, that helped to think about and to remember the solution.

I wrote quite a lot for each answer and spent an hour on it in the exam. (one hour was left)

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A word on the pearson test procedure, a few years ago I took the SCJP, SCWCD certifications, but I didn't need to give me signature three-times and to be photographed for each exam The photos look really bad and weird, this was quite funny.